Water and Electronics -
The unseen menace

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Water is insidious and gets everywhere – it can permeate through the walls of electronic enclosures and even into the components themselves – it has caused missiles to crash, computers to crash and all manner of products to fail. Surprisingly, liquid water itself isn't the big problem, even in marine environment with liquids sloshing all around, the difficulty is the invisible vapour that comes from water that permeates through the materials to condense on the inside.

It's impossible to avoid but, with a little help from Versaperm, you can decrease it so much that it is no longer a problem.

This menace is very much more serious than most people realise – products that include materials like cellulose, EVOH or PVOH may offer an excellent barrier against liquids, but they allow water vapour to flow in virtually unhindered. The same thing happens, to a greater or lesser extent, for almost every other material. Versaperm's latest permeability measurement equipment for materials and enclosures can measure exactly how quickly the vapour permeate across a wide range of conditions and for different designs, seals and materials. This allows you to select the best materials and most appropriate manufacturing techniques for any specific product.

It also delivers an efficient quality control system, as the properties of materials can change significantly from batch to batch.

The equipment is fast, and provides an easy and accurate way to measure vapour permeability not just for water vapour but optionally, for hydrocarbon vapour and most other gasses including hydrogen, oxygen, solvents and CO2.

Results are accurate in the Parts Per Million (PPM) range for most materials, more for some, and you can measure several separate material samples, seals or enclosures at a single time, sometimes in as little as 30 minutes.

Versaperm also offers a vapour permeability laboratory service for companies which only need to test samples on an irregular basis.